300 Years of Imaginary Space Ships: 1630-1920

The following is a guest post from Trevor Owens, Special Curator for the Library of Congress Science Literacy Initiative and Digital Archivist in the Office of Strategic Initiatives. He is also the author of the Inside Adams post on Envisioning Earth from Space before We Went There.

While humans didn’t build apparatus capable of traveling to the moon and other planets until the 1950s and 60s, there is a long history of thinking about the technology that could get us to other worlds. In this post, I share some illustrations of visions of space vehicles over time. The context for each imaginary contraption becomes fodder for understanding ideas about space and flight.

Image from the French publication of Francis Godwin’s Man on the Moone- L’homme dans la lune (Paris, 1666).

Interplanetary Super Geese: 1638

Publication of Galileo’s telescopic observations of the moon had an important effect on ideas about life on other worlds. Published in 1638, Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone, follows the exploits of Domingo Gonsales, a Spanish noblemen who, after a series of adventures on Earth, makes a voyage to the moon (This book has been republished numerous times. Your local library can help you get a copy). Gonsales discovers a species of swan-like birds. Realizing these birds can carry an extraordinary amount of weight, Gonsales creates a harness system that he uses to fly around an island. He tries to fly back to Spain, but the birds keep flying higher and higher taking him all the way to the moon. When he lands he finds there is a whole new world there, which he refers to as another Earth. It’s a place with plants, animals, and most surprisingly, a Utopian civilization of tall, Christian people. From the moon, Gonsales observes the Earth moving through the sky. This shift in perspective is helpful for thinking about the relationships between heavenly bodies.

Image from A voyage to the moon by Monsieur Cyrano de Bergerac (New York : Doubleday and McClure Co., 1899.)

Cyrano de Bergerac’s Fireworks Powered Flight: 1657

In Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon and of the Sun (First volume published in 1657 as L’autre monde: ou les États et Empires de la Lune et du Soleil ) Cyrano de Bergerac wrote about travel to other worlds. The English translation A voyage to the moon (1899) has been digitized by the Library of Congress. While these stories include references to a few different ways to leave the earth, one of the most interesting involved using fireworks to launch a machine off the ground. The work includes an image of what Cyrano’s voyage to the moon looked like.

Mercurial Static Powered Platform: 1775

In La Philosophe sans Pretention, a strange machine brings a visitor to earth from the planet Mercury. The contraption is allegedly powered by static electricity, produced when its two glass globes covered in gold leaf are rubbed with camphor as they turn on a platform. The powerful light changed the pressure of the air and enabled the alien operator to navigate. This electric motor is probably based on the frictional machines of his time which generated small electrical charges. (See the short discussion of this fictional flying machine in the section on Eighteenth-Century Science Fiction in the online exhibition, the Dream of Flight)

Chain-Based Space Elevator: 1835

Another vehicle shows something akin to a space elevator. A boat rides a set of two chains tethering the Earth to the Moon. In 1835 the New York Sun published 6 articles describing the discovery of various species of creatures inhabiting the moon. Allegedly written by Dr. Andrew Grant, the stories claimed to report on recent discoveries from the prolific astronomer John Herschel. In scientific circles the notion that there could be sophisticated life on the moon was quite plausible. John Herschel’s father, astronomer William Herschel, had worked to document life on the moon. In 1778 William Herschel believed he had observed lunar towns, but by the 1830’s observations of the moon were making it less likely that there were lunar civilizations. The 1835 articles were in fact written by Richard Locke, a reporter working for the New York Sun. In the articles, Herschel is alleged to have observed creatures that look like bison, goats, unicorns, and tail-less beavers in forests on the moon. The most stunning find, however, was the discovery of human-bat-creatures who had constructed temples on the moon. The story prompted a range of presentations and retelling, including these images, from a series of Italian prints (Ritorno di Pulcinella dalla luna and Scoperte fatte nella luna dal Sigr. Herschell)

Thomas Edison’s Anti-Gravity Ship: 1889

From Edison’s Conquest of Mars by Garrett Serviss in the The Los Angeles Herald, February 6, 1898. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.

The story begins with the aftermath of the Martian’s devastation of Earth. After the Martians retreat, the people of Earth are convinced that it was only a matter of time before they would strike again. To protect the earth, Queen Victoria, the Kaiser and the Mikado come to Washington D. C. to talk strategy. The world’s scientists, first and foremost the inventor Thomas Edison, are given large sums of money to develop weapons to strike back. Studying Martian technology, Edison produces a disintegrator ray and an anti-gravity device. With these technologies in hand, a fleet of 100 space ships is created to take the flight and fight to Mars.

Submarine Helicopter Gunship: 1920

The 1920 book A Trip to Mars by Marcianus Filomeno Rossi includes this rather detailed drawing of a spaceship, “The Aeriolus.” The ship is described as having a locked hull similar to a space ship, and comes with a set of oxygen tanks so the crew can breath during the flight. Interestingly, it uses a helicopter to ascend into space and then transitions to using the kick back from a set of guns to create a propelling force in the vacuum of space.

300 Years of Imaginary Space Flight

Each of these imaginary space ships one has it’s own intriguing story to tell, but together they illustrate 300 years of thinking through how everything from birds, to fireworks, to static electricity and a really long chain could be used to get people from the earth out to other worlds. I would be curious to hear your reflections and comments on each of these or examples of similar modes of interplanetary travel. What do you think these imaginary machines tell us about ourselves?

2 Comments

I was imagining that in Europe and other eastern countries; that the people before and after the 10th Centuries used to see different flying birds, the flying and hovering dragon flies and others. They took the planks and materials and created structures as bird wings; climbed up the hillocks and hills and sprang into the air. They flew for a short distance before they landed on the ground. The improvement was when the airplanes were created that flew in the countries of discovery and ultimately traveled to different countries. The educational fields were applied mathematics,physics, and chemistry. The creators are known as scientists. A big space challenge started between the 1950s and 1960s when we got news about the Sputnik followed by the Shuttle and the first man who landed on the moon. That started the space travel. The pace station on earth is NASA and the scientists bring to the people the planets and galaxy photographs. Mathematics, physics and chemistry produce the Ph.D. scientists.

I never knew any of this existed and it fascinates me to see the workings of the mind in action. I have often wondered how we went from the Wright Brothers to the Moon in less than a century. I now see that we did not; that the ideas had been flowing for centuries beforehand. This blog has been very enlightening for me and I am glad that I followed a link from Popular Science to read it. Thanks to the author.

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